What RAID configuration do I actually have?

In HP-speak, Arrays are the physical grouping of disks. Logical Drives are a subset of the Array and present the actual block device to your OS.

You can have multiple Logical Drives within an array. Those Logical Drives can have different RAID levels as well.

For example, this is a group of 6 disks with two logical drives, each of RAID 1+0 (RAID10):

  array A (SAS, Unused Space: 1857528  MB)

  logicaldrive 1 (72.0 GB, RAID 1+0, OK)
  logicaldrive 2 (1.5 TB, RAID 1+0, OK)

  physicaldrive 1I:2:1 (port 1I:box 2:bay 1, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)
  physicaldrive 1I:2:2 (port 1I:box 2:bay 2, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)
  physicaldrive 1I:2:3 (port 1I:box 2:bay 3, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)
  physicaldrive 1I:2:4 (port 1I:box 2:bay 4, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)
  physicaldrive 2I:2:5 (port 2I:box 2:bay 5, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)
  physicaldrive 2I:2:6 (port 2I:box 2:bay 6, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)

But I could also do something like (note the RAID5 Logical Drive):

  array A (SAS, Unused Space: 2534  MB)

  logicaldrive 1 (72.0 GB, RAID 1+0, OK)
  logicaldrive 2 (1024.0 GB, RAID 1+0, OK)
  logicaldrive 3 (869.1 GB, RAID 5, OK)

  physicaldrive 1I:2:1 (port 1I:box 2:bay 1, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)
  physicaldrive 1I:2:2 (port 1I:box 2:bay 2, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)
  physicaldrive 1I:2:3 (port 1I:box 2:bay 3, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)
  physicaldrive 1I:2:4 (port 1I:box 2:bay 4, SAS, 900.1 GB, OK)

So in your case, we're missing information... namely the sizes of the logical drives.

But from here, you have an Array of 4 disks, and two Logical Drives of unknown size carved out from that array.


HP Smart Array controllers (and any other recent raid implementation actually) treat raid1 as sort of raid10, which is exactly what they indicate. Raid10 is indeed a stripe of mirrors, but the trick is that mirror on two drives can also use striped reads at least - suppose you need to read two blocks - on block can be read from one drive, and another from second (on a consistent array, of course). That's what +0 indicates.